Parenting policy and study of literature

THE EDITOR: Reading and studying literature has great potential to shape a student to become a sensitive, articulate, discerning and insightful adult. That potential is not generally realised, at least not in TT today.

Consider that two of the most popular local set texts in CXC’s English B, Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and Ian McDonald’s The Hummingbird Tree, have such memorable depictions of local parenting practices among the major racial groups in their settings. These depictions have the power to generate in readers creative applications to contemporary situations to help us to understand our present parenting practices.

Careful reflection along these lines will bring us greater insight than the May 2017 National Parenting Policy document of the Ministry of Social Development. A sensitive, nuanced, realistic understanding of our parenting social landscape is missing as background to what ought to be the options for a national policy. Instead, the document is guided by the simplistic notion that there are “good” and “bad” practices, and that an agency to educate and train the “bad” to be more like the “good” is enough.

Beyond the outrage that we should be registering against the school practices that engender examination success in English B but effect no impact on students’ social consciousness or responsibility for social justice, the greater horror is the official unwillingness to acknowledge the truths recorded by our insightful artistes (novelists, poets, calypsonians, dramatists etc).

As a nation, we still have to learn how to reflect on the products of our creative imagination so as to sensibly guide our actions.

MARTIN JONES
, Chaguanas